Recenze Age of Empires IV » Vortex

There are developers of both remakes and remasters who will make the first last part of the marketing campaign to convince players of the uniqueness of all changes and improvements that are guaranteed not to destroy the quality of the original game. It spills on us from all sides, sometimes it sounds good, sometimes it doesn’t make sense, but the period of returning to the classics simply continues, even though not all fans endure it without expressions of displeasure. Well, and then there’s the Relic Entertainment studio, which has been working on Age of Empires IV for the past few years to only indirectly confirm to us recently that it is in fact making a remake of the second part, despite the great care that Age of Empires does. Empires II gets. I didn’t believe I would say that, but it was a matter of certain here and don’t expect any experiments or even genre shifts. This is neither very good nor bad news, but everything will largely depend on your point of view and especially your previous experience.

We’ve seen this before…

If you are a fan of the series, then you have probably participated in the recent beta test and therefore have a relatively clear idea of ​​what awaits you. To this account, I can say that not much has changed – the game has not undergone any magical optimization, the interface has not changed, the graphics have not moved and the changes introduced into the online game cannot be evaluated at all at the moment due to lack of players from a handful of journalists and content creators. Don’t worry, however, the review doesn’t end here, because of course the full version has a lot more content and puts the cards on the table without hesitation. Everyone else who is not very interested in the fourth part of this famous real-time strategy must know about all the diverse nations, great singleplayer campaigns, perfect music and other little things that make Age of Empires IV smiling and maybe a little senile. ticket vendors to the past. The offer is very attractive at first glance, and this time the developers from Relic decided to focus on fun history teaching even more strongly than their predecessors from Ensemble Studios. It’s one of the first great things, and I’m afraid you won’t look at other historical strategies after the experience of Age of Empires IV the same way.

Probably the strongest historical concept of the game is reflected in the mentioned campaigns. There are four of them and their planting copies eight playable nations. In the area of ​​several hundred years, you will first look at England, when it was under Norman rule. In order for the hartus between the English and the French not to be small, a hundred-year war awaits you in the second campaign. And then you move east to witness the rise of Moscow and then seize the Mongols and conquer not only Russia, but especially China. As you can see, campaigns could be geographically grouped into pairs in which they form a certain contradiction to themselves. From my point of view, this is a great decision that can give the player a sufficiently detailed view of the opposing parties, better understand their motives and realize that nothing is black and white. Although the developers do not deal with any controversial moments and just glide along historical lines, they give the fans context and, above all, explain some partial historical circumstances. Part of the campaigns, which can be played on a skipping path without the need to unlock them gradually, is a large number of microdocuments that will basically prepare you for what will come in the next chapter of the campaign. Sometimes they are siege engines, other times ring brno and sometimes you get a striking excursion into the life of Mongolian archers on horseback.

Historical documents for everyone

The documentaries are well shot, they go straight to the point, and even though they sometimes recycle some shots among themselves, they work really well. Perhaps even better are the introductions of individual missions or divisions between chapters. I don’t know how you are, but I have seldom read long text annotations of what awaits me on the battlefield in other strategies after a few hours, but in Age of Empires IV I saw everything to the last second and really enjoyed it. Perhaps most important is the aforementioned context that short films are given to players and demonstrations of war practices or crafts. The films are unlocked gradually, you can of course play them repeatedly from the main menu and the only thing that can potentially stand in the way of a really successful experience is the absence of Czech. The language used in the documents is not complicated, but there is quite a lot of information and without knowledge of English or another world language into which, unlike our mother tongue, the game is translated, it will unfortunately not work.

This is not a hardcore matter, and on the contrary, I suspect Relic developers of a slight stupidity of some aspects even in the mantinels of Age of Empires.

On the other hand, this no longer applies to their own play, which is so reminiscent of the Age of Empires II mentioned in the introduction, that even those who have only interfered with this game in the past will quickly find their way around. The fourth part also remains a real-time strategy of classic editing, in which you move along the ladder of four epochs in accordance with the rules of the series. You manage a village or a city, you take care of the economy on the basis of four basic raw materials and, of course, you build an army. It is easy to learn the basic principles of the game, but the championship comes with tens of minutes played and after consolidating in skirmish or multiplayer. On the other hand, this is not a hardcore matter, and on the contrary, I suspect Relic developers of a slight stupidity of some aspects in the Age of Empires mantinels. Probably the most evident in the fights, from which, for example, thanks to 100% accurate shooting of archers, a significant part of the micromanagement of the units fell out. Maybe that’s why the developers took a few more steps, which I’m not happy with, and I have a feeling that fans of a little more complex strategies will be very successful until any future patches. For example, you don’t see the waypoints of your characters or explorers, so you don’t really know where and where they’re going. The units cannot be set up with a completely banal patrol ability on the marked route. And what can be an even bigger obstacle to all this, the developers were very uncomfortable changing the keys. Although most of the shortcuts in Age of Empires IV work as in previous episodes, you can only toggle them on the selected twelve keys, with the Alt button modifier, for example, firmly attached to the camera rotation and not being used for anything else. I consider it unnecessary sticks under my feet and a problem especially in fast matches with other players or stronger artificial intelligence.

Icons, buttons and other junk

The user interface, which has undergone a lot of changes, especially in its visual processing, is not exactly a friendly partner. Although I gradually came to the conclusion that the icons instead of pictures of units or buildings don’t really bother me that much, and I also like the hints of what will unlock when moving on to the next epoch, the details of the game menu are not completely tightened. This is probably most noticeable in unit upgrades, for which the developers have always chosen the exact same icon, differing only in the number of pixels of small dots showing the individual stages of a particular improvement. With a faster game, you can overlook what level you are, what exactly you are improving and, most importantly, what effect it will have, because even in this respect, Age of Empires IV is a bit of a mysterious game. Learning, specifically for some buildings, what exactly they are doing with the units in the marked field means spending a few precious seconds waiting for a pop-up tooltip and further searching. Nevertheless, the game remains generally smooth and on the third or fourth level of difficulty it can torment quite solidly without artificial intelligence cheating. In such a case, it is also necessary to very well combine the abilities of leaders and the characteristics of special units while maintaining a functioning economy, which starts a fairly solid fast.

A huge advantage of Age of Empires IV is the diversity of individual nations and the element borrowed from Age of Mythology or other titles. Each time you move into another era with your nation, you must choose one of the buildings that will subsequently influence your further development and direction. Even in these places, the experience of branches and other significant changes brings with it the choice of who you go to battle for. The Mongols assemble their canvas structures and are free to transport them across the countryside to break up the village a little closer to battle. The Sultanate of Delhi can rely on free upgrades of almost anything that can be improved, but the currency is much longer than in other nations, although it can be knocked down by a number of monks. The soldiers of the Holy Roman Empire have great fortresses. The Chinese collect money continuously through taxes. And I could go on like this for a long time. However, it is not the point to list everything, but to point out that playing can always be a little different and varied enough to motivate you to try different nations and look for the best possible strategies. At the same time, the campaign will perfectly equip you by pointing out those national specialties and everything will fit together nicely in sharp matches.

Grind and improve, please

Unfortunately, not everything you experience in Age of Empires IV has a touch of diversity and variety that would make you happy. From a technical point of view, the game is not very good and it is a bit surprising that the developers could not avoid the problems that we encountered in the strategies ten or fifteen years ago. Probably the worst is the movement of units and pathfinding, which further underlines the constant interweaving of units with objects, strange choppy animations and occasional outages of response to mouse clicks, especially in skirmish. However, errors also appear in the scripted sequences, which have to complete the story started with the help of a movie before the mission before the game starts, which is still astonishing and the shortcomings of this nature cannot really be overlooked, although they do not affect the gameplay. Above all, there is a strong stylization of Age of Empires IV, which goes against the established orders and left me in the final impression considerably divided. For example, buildings look really great, as do walls or their destruction. But the characters, the surrounding objects, nature or water seem to my taste far too drawn and without the appropriate details, of which the previous part had more. I understand that this is the chosen style and it is probably the biggest risk they take in Relic, but personally it didn’t suit my taste very well and I don’t even consider it to be clearly clear. Choosing the desired unit if you need one, not the whole union, is difficult not only because there are no significant differences between them, but also because they like to cluster and do not allow a comfortable choice. You can’t even help with a camera, because the zoom is very limited, so you don’t see enough detail or the desired space around you if you need to operate with a larger army. And when you add to this the relatively large demands on hardware and the impossibility of having a complex, albeit at first glance not very technologically advanced, strategy to achieve a stable frame rate, it’s a bit startling.